


It Starts With Time

by enigma731



Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Natasha Romanov Backstory, Natasha Romanov Feels, POV Natasha Romanov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2016-10-19
Packaged: 2018-08-23 11:46:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8326675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enigma731/pseuds/enigma731
Summary: “There was a file on me in the archive from the information dump," says Natasha. "Not my personnel file. I think it must have been Hydra’s. Either that or it belonged to someone in S.H.I.E.L.D. who wasn’t sharing with anybody else.”


  “What did it say?” asks Clint, the beginning of understanding coloring his voice. He knows where this is going, she thinks, or at least has the basic idea.


  “Mostly what I already knew,” she admits. “Just--written somewhat more--colorfully, let’s say.”


  “But that’s not what’s bugging you now. That’s not why you called.”

This is the story of Natasha's search for her parents.





	

**Author's Note:**

> With huge thanks to [Kristina Davidovna](kristinadavidovna.tumblr.com) for consultation on all things Russian in this fic. I never could have turned this idea into a story without your help and encouragement. 
> 
> Thanks also to [gettingovergreta](http://archiveofourown.org/users/GettingOverGreta/pseuds/GettingOverGreta) for jumping in to help with last minute beta.

Natasha doesn’t worry when the smoking corpse of S.H.I.E.L.D. has been buried and Clint fails to resurface. Or, at least, she doesn’t worry _more_ about him than she has been since the aliens opened a wormhole in the sky, since he had a demigod inside of his head. 

If she’s honest with herself, it’s been two years of near-constant gnawing concern over his distance, over his utter lack of protests at having his field clearance revoked, at being put on indefinite desk duty at the office in St. Louis. If she’s honest with herself, the distance has been there since she was assigned to shadow Tony Stark and he was shipped off to New Mexico, because that was the last time she saw him in person prior to the whole brainwashing thing. If she’s honest with herself, she hasn’t really been expecting him to call, because that would mean doing more than simply going through the motions. 

Natasha is very good at avoiding being honest with herself. 

Still, there’s a part of her that’s disappointed, a part of her that’s angry, and a part of her that’s very tempted to simply lump him in with the newly-populated list of people who have betrayed her, who have fallen solidly into the category she’s mentally filed as ‘no longer significant.’ But that part of her is small and weak compared to the voice of instinct that tells her she needs to find Clint in this world that’s been turned upside down, needs her partner, needs her touchstone. 

“Call me,” she tells the voicemail on his encrypted line, the fourth time she dials it without answer. In the past, the missed calls alone would have been enough to get her message across, to make him get back to her somehow. But this is not the past, and clearly it requires stronger measures. “At least let me know you’re--alive.”

_’Okay’_ would have been too optimistic a request, she thinks. She hangs up the phone.

* * *

Clint doesn’t call like she’s asked, but he does send a message to one of her dummy email accounts. In the past, he might have disguised it as a piece of vaguely coded spam--one time he’d sent a particularly sensitive message under the guise of an ad for boomerang arrows--or a porn advertisement with one of his signature god-awful puns in the subject line. But this is not the past, and today it’s just a message from a randomly-generated anonymous address.

_I’m alive. Figuring things out. Don’t follow._

That last is sufficiently uncharacteristic to pique her curiosity, to make her tempted to defy the request and track him down after all, if only to see why he hasn’t wanted her to do so. In the end she doesn’t, though, the decision is made with equal parts respect and hurt. If he wants to be alone, then she ought to trust him. But if he doesn’t _want_ her partnership in whatever path he’s taking now, then she sure as hell isn’t asking for his in return.

* * *

All things considered, Natasha is rather ashamed to admit that it takes her a full three days after the fighting, the clean-up, and the hearings have all ended before she sits down to actually _look_ at the data she’s so generously liberated. Granted, one of those is spent sleeping, and another traveling to the old bolthole she keeps in Virginia, an old cabin that’s never quite as remote or isolated as she’d like. The third goes to simple procrastination, though, and after that, she’s forced to admit she has precious little left in the way of excuses.

She actually has the basic workings of a full communications array here, keeps one in all of her residences, just in case. But that’s the thing about setting information free--for once she doesn’t need to disguise her online identity, doesn’t need to hack into any networks or archives. Today she has the luxury of simply booting up one of her laptops and downloading the files from where she left them, courtesy of the Council’s fancy holo-touchscreen. 

Natasha has made it her business at S.H.I.E.L.D. to be familiar with as much of the considerable archive as possible. It’s partly the fact that intel is her job--you don’t get to be a good spy without being good about doing your homework--but also the constant insecurity that’s always gnawed at the back of her mind, the voices of her past that insisted this sense of not-quite-family was far too good to be real or permanent. She’d wanted warning if the doubts were going to turn out to be right. The irony is that they were, and it never came. 

Even with her previous reading experience, there’s an enormous amount of data. She spends nearly an hour staring at her screen, watching incredulously as the files continue to download. It feels like the time passes in suspended animation, and she’s surprised to look at the clock and see how many minutes she’s lost when the download finally indicates that it’s complete. 

She loses three times that many glancing at the directory, skimming file names one after another. Some of them are still encrypted--Hydra used multiple layers, unsurprisingly, encryption within security within another layer of code that made the information nonexistent to all but a privileged few. For a while she finds herself simply overwhelmed, despairing of ever figuring out where to start, and tempted to simply erase the whole thing from her computer, or perhaps smash the laptop itself and run. 

She is under no obligation to learn any of this, she thinks. True, there’s the morbid curiosity that wants to know what unwitting role she might have played in past atrocities. There’s also the sense of morality that says she needs to know, needs to add those wrongs to her cosmic ledger, needs to figure out yet more tasks in her never-ending atonement. If she doesn’t face these truths head-on, she thinks, she will lose the identity she’s been carving out for herself all these years. But even that has a certain appeal. 

She’s almost managed to justify quitting, at least for today, in her mind, when she comes to the first set of files that truly gives her pause. Each file corresponds to a person, some names she recognizes and others she doesn’t. It’s immediately clear that these are persons of interest, as far as Hydra--or perhaps just S.H.I.E.L.D.--is concerned. _Bruce Banner_ is one of the first names that jumps out at her, and _Stephen Strange_ \--two of the people Sitwell had mentioned, and for a moment she wonders whether these files might correspond to all of the targets identified by Zola’s Insight algorithm. There don’t seem to be quite enough for that, though.

_James Barnes_ is on the list, along with _Maria Hill_ , and a host that she only vaguely recognizes-- _Matthew Murdock, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones._ _Clint Barton_ gives her pause, and she freezes entirely when she reaches her own name, her hands falling away from the computer so that it balances precariously on her knees.

In the moment, she can’t pinpoint what it is about this discovery that chills her so thoroughly. It’s not like she was unaware that S.H.I.E.L.D.’s spent actual years collecting intel on her, both before she officially became an agent, and after. Hell, she’d been grateful for the information once upon a time, when she’d been trying to put together the ragged pieces of her memory left behind after the tampering that created her. 

Later, she wonders if a part of her already realized the meaning of this record’s existence, if her instinct somehow recognized what was to come.

* * *

Listening to the phone line ringing, Natasha isn’t really expecting to get an answer. It’s been four days since her last unsuccessful attempt at contacting Clint, two since his seemingly reluctant email. She’s fairly certain he doesn’t want to talk, and in truth she could probably get the same information she’s seeking from Nick. But if she’s honest with herself, she was looking for an excuse to make this call anyway. If she’s honest with herself, she just plain misses him.

“What’s wrong?” asks Clint, when he answers on the fifth ring. He sounds mildly alarmed, though not irritated at all, like she’s expected.

Natasha blinks, unprepared to actually do the talking now that she has the chance. “What do you mean?”

“It’s after midnight for you,” says Clint, then continues before she can question how he knows that. “Nick told me you left DC, and if you were in New York, you would have gotten the message I tried to leave you before I took off myself. So I assume that means you’re in Virginia. Either way, Eastern time, which means it’s after midnight.”

“I could be overseas,” she says stubbornly. She’s been perched on the edge of the bed, expecting to be unsuccessful, to hang up almost as quickly as she’d begun. “I could be in Nice. You don’t know.”

“You’re not in Nice,” Clint says dismissively. “You don’t watch your life crash and burn, then run off to the beach. And you don’t call me after midnight unless there’s a job or something is wrong.”

“I’m a night owl,” says Natasha, suddenly unsure of why it’s so important for him to be wrong in his assumptions. She toes off her shoes, pauses for a moment before lying back on the creaky mattress, still on top of the neatly spread comforter, as if this proves that she wasn’t really intending to go to bed anytime soon.

Clint sighs loudly enough for her to hear it over the phone. “No you’re not. Not without me around to keep you up. So how about getting to why you’re calling?”

“Maybe I’m up because I still want to know where you ran off to,” she suggests, then decides that she’s being unfair. Besides, she doesn’t want to piss him off enough to hang up on her for who-knows-how-long. “Fine. I wanted--” She pauses, tries to decide how to phrase her actual question.

“You wanted?” Clint prompts, when she’s gone silent for a few breaths too long. 

“Before you brought me in, you were given my files to review, right?” she says finally, aware of how that question will strike him, the suspicions it will arouse.

“Yeah,” Clint says warily. “It was part of the briefing. You know that.”

“Right,” says Natasha. “But you didn’t collect the information, did you? It was just given to you, already amassed.”

“Right,” he echoes.

She purses her lips, feels the phone growing warmer in her hand as it works to keep finding the network out here in the middle of the woods. “Who collected it, then?”

Clint pauses, apparently thinking for a moment. “Hill, I think. And Carter.”

“And where did they get it from?” she presses. In her peripheral vision, she can see a wrinkle in the comforter that’s been created by the weight of her body. Suddenly she finds it acutely irritating, reaches out to smooth it.

“I don’t know,” Clint admits. “I mean, I didn’t generally make a habit of asking where S.H.I.E.L.D.’s intel came from. Just--kind of figured they had their methods. Why, did you ask?”

“No,” says Natasha. The wrinkle has sprung back up now that she’s removed her hand, and she glares at it. “No, and I’m sure Nick wouldn’t deign to tell me if I asked now.”

“Yeah,” he answers, after a beat, and only then does it occur to Natasha how truly disconnected they’ve been since everything went to hell, how she’s fallen down on her own promise to keep Clint out of the dark. “You know, I had a feeling he wouldn’t be that easy to kill.”

Natasha blows out a breath, rolling over so that her shoulder rests on the spot she’s just been trying to smooth, leaving a whole new set of peaks and valleys in the bedclothes in her wake. “I’m sorry. I should have told you. I just--I’ve gotten so used to assuming you have all the same information I do.”

“Right,” he says flatly, again. “So probably you should cut the crap and tell me what’s really going on here.”

She turns over again so that her cheek is pressed against the pillow, her gaze fixed on the corner of the room. The boards that make up the walls here are full of knotholes, and she finds her eye drawn to three of them that converge to look uncomfortably like a face. “There was a file on me in the archive from the information dump. Not my personnel file. I mean, that was there too, but this--This was different. I think it must have been Hydra’s. Either that or it belonged to someone in S.H.I.E.L.D. who wasn’t sharing with anybody else.”

“What did it say?” asks Clint, the beginning of understanding coloring his voice. He knows where this is going, she thinks, or at least has the basic idea.

“Mostly what I already knew,” she admits. “Just--written somewhat more--colorfully, let’s say. It’s out there if you want to look for yourself. The whole world can look for itself if it wants.”

“But that’s not what’s bugging you now. That’s not why you called.”

“You told me,” she says finally, “that my birth date was November 22, 1984. I remember you telling me. I remember you showing me in the file, when I told you I had never known.”

“Yeah,” he says patiently, knowing that her thought clearly doesn’t end there.

“This file,” says Natasha, articulating each word carefully, as if that might somehow make it easier to believe, might make it feel more real, “says that I was born on December 21, 1983.”

Clint is silent for a long moment on the other end of the line, taking this in. “What do you think that means?”

“I don’t know,” she says automatically, then thinks better of it. She _does_ know, and that’s the whole problem. “If we’ve all been serving Hydra without knowing it, then none of us is who we thought we were, right? Not entirely. So--I wonder how much more is out there somewhere. I wonder what else S.H.I.E.L.D.--or Hydra--didn’t want me to know.”

* * *

Natasha takes the information for a walk in the woods. 

Secretly, she wants it to be cold and overcast, feels like the threat of a storm would be fitting, given the circumstances. Plus the subtle threat of electricity in the air might help her focus, might force her to find the resolve she’s missing.

But it’s summer, and the universe doesn’t seem to be on her side anyway, so naturally it’s ninety degrees and blindingly sunny. The humidity makes her hike feel like moving through molasses, and not in the pleasant warm-relaxed-muscles way she sometimes finds after a good workout.

If she’s honest with herself, the problem is that a part of her doesn’t want to know. 

There was a time when she would have given anything--her life included--for any more knowledge of her own past. She has always prized facts, a side effect of being raised and made on lies, craved them like water in the desert when she’d first earned her freedom. Once upon a time, that curiosity saved her life, made her follow the man with the bow and the promise of truths about herself. 

It’s been years since she last considered the possibility of filling in the remaining holes in her memory, has long since accepted that there are parts of her origin that will be forever lost. Now she’s forced to admit that a not inconsiderable part of her doesn’t want to take the chance of finishing the puzzle, is afraid that the whole thing might simply shatter if the new pieces don’t fit the way she expects. 

She has to, though, when she gets right down to it. It’s a loose thread dangling before her eyes, and she has never been any good at passing those by.

* * *

“What did you find?” asks Clint, by way of greeting the next time she calls. This time he’s picked up on the second ring, has apparently been expecting the contact, and isn’t otherwise occupied. She follows that little tidbit away for later.

“I went back to the database,” says Natasha. She’s sitting at the kitchen table this time, looking out the window at the trail that passes in front of the cabin, and this time it _is_ raining. It’s not the sort of atmospheric drizzle she’s been craving, though, instead is the sort of bloating summer rainstorm that leaves the ground pockmarked and muddy, that can’t quite manage to whip itself into a proper thunderstorm but manages to be loud and irritating on the roof all the same.

“And?” Clint prompts, his tone not quite impatient, though he obviously isn’t interested in any sort of drawn-out suspense at the moment.

“I used the new birth date as my search key,” says Natasha. It’s important, suddenly, that he knows exactly how she arrived at this newest conclusion, because she needs him to tell her if she’s crazy for making it, if she’s skipped a step in the logical process somehow. “Just pulled up any records that included it. Which, as you might imagine, mostly produced a lot of unrelated junk.” She breaks off, swallows.

“And some not-junk,” says Clint, reading her hesitation across the airwaves.

“And some not-junk,” she repeats. She takes a breath, her thoughts jumping back suddenly to the speed with which he answered this call. “Hey, where are you?”

He exhales audibly on the other end of the line, not quite a sigh, more a sound she recognizes as his own personal brand of empathy. “You first, Nat. Tell me what you called to tell me.”

Natasha swallows again, forges ahead because this is the kind of gentle prodding support she’s been missing from him, isn’t going to reject it. “A young couple named Ilya and Nadezhda Yozhin had a baby girl in St. Petersburg on that date. A baby mentioned in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s records.”

“Your parents,” he breathes, as if there’s no question for him.

“I don’t know,” says Natasha, because she isn’t ready to accept it yet, isn’t ready to trust it with any sort of emotion. “I don’t know. The names don’t appear anywhere else in this database. But--But it’s not like that’s the only source of information in the world.”

“Hardly,” says Clint. “Hardly, for you.”

“Where are you?” Natasha repeats, because she isn’t ready to consider all of the ways she could move forward with this, isn’t ready to have that kind of responsibility over her own future right this moment. If she’s honest with herself, a part of her was hoping he’d talk her out of the association, poke a logical hole in her argument. The connection between these people, a date she’s only just learned, and her own history seems tenuous at best if she views it from just the right angle. But from every other vantage, it looks far sturdier than most of the leads she’s followed in her career. 

“Middle of nowhere,” he answers, finally. He probably hears her impatience through the line somehow, because he quickly amends, “Middle of the country. Same difference.”

“You have a new place?” asks Natasha, because she’s pretty sure he would have just told her if he was staying at any of his previously-established residences. There’d be no need for the vagueness she’s been getting in each of his calls.

“No,” says Clint. “Unless we’re counting Motel 6.”

She frowns. “You’re on the road?”

He sighs ruefully. “Right now I’m at a Motel 6. Hope I don’t pick up any hitchhiking bed bugs.”

“If you do,” says Natasha, “you’d best not be coming home anytime soon.” She feels a pang at the words even in jest, suddenly wants nothing more than to have him here with her, viewing these revelations over her shoulder.

“No worries,” he says simply, and leaves it at that.

* * *

“You told me I was an orphan,” says Natasha, the moment the call connects. She’s being reckless all around--perched at the edge of the trail, feet dangling over the side of the ravine below, speaking before confirming her recipient, allowing her anger to ignite unchecked. At the moment she doesn’t care. At the moment, dangerous feels fucking perfect.

Clint makes an unintelligible sound on the other end of the line, probably an aborted greeting with considerably less hostility. “Yes? That’s the information I was given.”

“Of course it was,” says Natasha. “That’s what Hydra wanted you to believe. That’s what Madame told me, too. That’s what they said about all of us, in the Room.”

“So--I’m guessing it’s not true?” asks Clint. He sounds taken aback, has every right to be, though to his credit, he isn’t irritated or defensive. 

A part of her wishes that he was, wants nothing more than a target to attack.

“I took my--I took the names,” says Natasha, swallowing. She still isn’t ready to call these people her own, isn’t ready to call _anyone_ her own these days, unless she’s absolutely sure she knows the whole truth about them. The smoking rubble of S.H.I.E.L.D. is plenty enough reminder of how costly that mistake has already been. “I cross-referenced them against census data. Found their birth dates. And their last known location. No death certificates.”

“Okay,” he agrees carefully, still maddeningly calm, the familiar touchstone she’s been wishing for and missing for the past two years. Now, suddenly, she wants anything but. “Does that--Correct me if I’m wrong, you’re better at this stuff than I am by a long shot. But do missing death certificates really mean much, given the circumstances?”

“It’s not just that,” she insists. The ground next to her is covered in loose gravel; she picks up a handful and tosses it over the side of the ravine, watching it clatter softly downward until it looks like nothing more than a cloud of dust in the air. “That last known location? They were government prisoners. In February 1983.”

The line is quiet for a moment, just long enough that Natasha is about to ask whether they’ve lost the connection when he speaks again. “I don’t follow.”

“These people,” says Natasha, biting out the words, “were imprisoned by the government when I was three months old.”

“They were living when they were imprisoned,” he says thoughtfully. “And presumably their child would have been taken from them then. So--You’re thinking you entered the Red Room program as a baby? Earlier than you’d thought before?”

“There _were_ babies,” says Natasha. “Not where we were trained, that would have been too dangerous for everyone involved. But there was a nursery. An orphanage, really. Sometimes they’d send one of us there, to fetch a new recruit.”

“So,” Clint continues, apparently swallowing this piece of information without much emotion, “they took you as a baby, when your parents went to prison, and called you an orphan? I feel like I still don’t have the full story here, Nat.” At some point he’s become as jaded by the Red Room’s abuses as she is, Natasha realizes, or he might have mistaken that particular horror for being the sole cause of her anger. 

“You don’t.” She bites her lip, tastes blood and feels the shock of pain, still not enough to dull the rage that’s smoldering icily in the pit of her belly. “You might also recall that I wasn’t just told I was an orphan. I was told that I killed them. Set fire to the house while they were sleeping. That was--It was everything. The reason I belonged in the Room to begin with.”

“Fuck,” Clint breathes, sounding appalled at the reminder, and at himself for having forgotten. “ _Fuck._ Of course.”

“It wasn’t true,” says Natasha, her anger cresting and breaking the moment she says those words aloud, shattering into a thousand sharp pieces of glassy grief. “ _It was never true._ ”

“Natasha,” he whispers, his own voice sounding thick with an emotion she can’t quite name. “Natasha. This isn’t--I won’t tell you that it doesn’t change anything. It does. But you have never been the monster they wanted you to see.”

“There’s still one last thing,” says Natasha, because she can’t answer that right now, can’t even bring herself to consider what he’s saying when everything feels so raw.

“What’s that?” To his credit, he doesn’t protest.

“There’s no record of their deaths,” she repeats. “Which probably means that they died in prison and nobody bothered to record it. But it could--There’s a chance they could still be alive.”

* * *

The phone is still warm in her hand after she hangs it up. Natasha turns it over once, then over again, feeling the heat from her body mingling with that from its battery, from its mechanisms working, connecting her to Clint over who-knows-how-many miles. She brushes her thumb along its scratched surface, then sets it on the table.

It’s been dark outside the windows for hours; the days are getting shorter again now. She ought to go to bed, she thinks, ought to sleep on all of this before she makes any more decisions, but if she’s honest with herself, she knows that she’s still far too unsettled for that. 

Glancing at the phone again, she tries to remember her anger, so potent just a few minutes ago, and finds only a strange, deep sadness, a longing for something she can’t articulate. She looks around the cabin, shrouded in shadows, but still visible in the dim light from the single soft lamp in the corner. This was one of the first spaces she claimed as her own, after coming to S.H.I.E.L.D., after beginning to put together the pieces of herself, and she has always loved it better than any of her other residences. Tonight it feels oddly empty though, hollow.

A home for a woman she’s no longer sure she recognizes. A home for a woman who might not exist. A home for a woman who has always been stitched together on a fabric of lies.

She doesn’t want to be here anymore, she realizes, though she can’t seem to place where she _does_ want to be. Not New York or D.C. Certainly not her old offices at S.H.I.E.L.D. Not in any of her other, more anonymous safe houses, either. She _wants_ to be wherever Clint is, she thinks, though even that isn’t quite accurate. His presence would be grounding, and that would be nice, but what she’s really craving right now is that sense of balance, of completeness, all on her own. 

Sighing, she picks up her phone again, scrolls through her contacts until she finds the one she needs, heavily coded and seldom used, at least in the days when she had all of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s resources at her fingertips. When she had people that she trusted more.

“I need to call in another favor,” she breathes, when the line connects and her contact picks up.

* * *

The next time they speak, Clint is the one who calls, and the timing is so uncanny that Natasha actually jumps at the sound of her phone vibrating against the particleboard night stand, which is apparently both cheap and hollow, like everything else in this place. 

She snatches it up, glances at the number before answering, her voice hushed. “Clint?” This room is anything but cozy, smells of mildew and makes her feel like she ought to shower as soon as she’s able to get anywhere else. But it’s cheap, and it’s a place to spend the night, which is really all she needs at the moment. 

“No,” he teases. “That other guy who knows all your secrets.”

“Not funny,” she hisses at the phone, though she has to admit that under most other circumstances, she probably would have laughed. Tonight it strikes just a little too closely at a nerve.

“Why are we whispering?” asks Clint, apparently having noticed her attempts to keep the volume down. “You somewhere safe?”

Natasha sighs, tells herself that it’s time to rein in the paranoia at least a bit. “I’m in a hotel. Spent most of the afternoon listening to the neighbors having marathon sex. The acoustics here are great, as long as you don’t want anything resembling privacy.”

He snorts. “Fun. Hotel where?”

“Prague,” says Natasha, feeling vaguely guilty for leaving the country without telling him, especially given the current state of their lives. Then again, it’s not like he’s been particularly forthcoming about his location, or his current activities. “You?”

“I’ve graduated,” says Clint, “from the Motel 6 to the Super 8.”

“Oh,” she says dryly, “moving up in the world.” 

“You get a lead on your parents?” he asks, his tone cautious now. 

“I don’t know,” she admits. There’s a file on the nightstand, next to where her phone was a few minutes ago, and she’s spent the better part of the evening trying to ignore it, though it’s what she’s come here to acquire.

“What do you know?” he asks, not harshly or unkindly, but the insinuation is clear: he knows there’s more to the story, and he’s called to get it.

“I called in a favor,” says Natasha. “Well--another favor. Came here to pick up the drop.”

“And?” he prompts.

“And nothing,” she snaps, irritation flaring, though it’s not really at him. “I haven’t read it yet.”

“Am I interrupting you?” asks Clint, sounding a little taken aback for the first time during this call.

Natasha blinks, her thoughts failing to track, between the time difference and the simple fact that she hasn’t exactly been sleeping since S.H.I.E.L.D. fell. “What?”

“The file,” Clint prompts. “You got it, you haven’t read it. Am I stopping you?”

“What if you are?” she asks, because anger is easier right now than anything else she’s feeling. Voices float through the wall, nebulous, indecipherable, just the subtle reminder that she isn’t truly as alone as she’d like to be. 

“Natasha,” he says softly, in the tone that has always gone straight to her heart.

She sighs. “You’re not interrupting. I was avoiding.”

“You?” he teases gently. “Never.”

“Yeah,” she insists, chagrined. “Now.”

“You worried about what it might say or what it might not?” asks Clint. He exhales audibly on the other end of the phone, and she thinks she can hear the mattress creaking as he shifts. For a moment her heart aches with the familiarity of it, and the distance. 

“Both?” she runs a hand through her hair, wincing when her fingers catch on a snarl. “It’s--whatever it says, it’s going to change things.”

“Ah,” says Clint. “Change. My old arch nemesis.”

Something in his voice--maybe the dry humor, maybe the warmth, or maybe just the simple sense of understanding, but it breaks something in her chest and she huffs out a ragged laugh. “Yes, that. You want to come here and shoot it for me?”

“Gladly. Remind me to pack my time machine arrows.”

“Time machine arrows?” She quirks an eyebrow, realizes he can’t see it and sighs. “You been holding out on me?”

“Nah,” says Clint. “They’ve been in the weapons locker the whole time. Right next to the teleportation arrows.”

“Now those,” says Natasha, feeling another pang of longing, “are a thing I really wish you had right now.”

He’s quiet for a moment before speaking again. “Hey, tell you what. If I’m remembering the time difference right, you need to get some sleep right now and I need to get up and going. But if you want, call me back when it’s morning your time, and we’ll--I can’t teleport, but I’ll be here while you read it. If you want.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she says immediately, then, “I’ll call you in the morning.”

* * *

“It occurred to me last night,” says Natasha, “while I was not sleeping, that it’s probably no coincidence that there’s a file on these people. I mean, a _file_ , not just a collection of random information stuffed into an envelope. Somebody was tabulating this before I ever asked for it, and I think that somebody was the government.”

The phone is sitting on the upper right corner of the flimsy hotel desk, on the speaker setting. 

“Well,” says Clint, after a moment, “as you so often remind me, you’re Russian. Creeping on people is kind of what the government _does_ , isn’t it?”

“That’s an insultingly simplistic way to put it,” says Natasha, though she knows she’s being unfair. Clint might not have her training or her half-dozen languages, but he has never been anything approaching _simplistic._

“That’s me,” he agrees, without malice. He’s quiet for a moment before speaking again, his voice crisp through the speaker this time, as though he might truly be just a few feet away instead of countless, nebulous miles. “Open the file, Nat.”

“It’s open,” she lies, then sighs and does as she’s told, flipping the cover outward and letting her eyes skim over the first page. “Now it is.”

“Good,” says Clint. “Just--Take your time, yeah? I’m not in a hurry.”

Natasha hears the words distantly, as if through a veil, through the deluge of adrenaline and expectation. She hears the shape of them but not the meaning, couldn’t obey it even if she had. The last dam of her hesitation is broken and now her gaze is flying over the words, the information coming to her in a rush, like it might somehow be able to replace the intake of the breath she’s holding. 

She can’t say how much time passes, later, only that it feels as though all of her body’s motion hangs suspended while she reads, that the history she’s learning crystallizes all at once. She misses the precise moment when she is tipped over from _before_ , in spite of all her preparations, recognizes only when she is falling headlong into _after_ and everything feels just a little crooked, just a little off-kilter.

“Nat?” Clint asks finally, the sound of his voice breaking into her reverie, grounding her as it always has, though it doesn’t quite chase away that surreal feeling of _other_ -ness, as though she might simply be watching the shell of her former self read the file.

“I’m here,” she forces out, shakes herself at the surprisingly alien sound of her own voice. “I’m--sorry, I’m here.”

“Tell me,” he says, and the warmth in his voice twists something dangerous inside of her chest, as though he’s touched her instead.

“I thought,” says Natasha, breaking off to swallow, her throat feeling oddly dry and also tight. “I thought that if there was a file on them, they might have been Hydra. Or Red Room. Or--both, somehow. Maybe.”

“But they’re not,” says Clint, apparently reading the truth of that statement in the sound of her voice. “They weren’t.”

“No.” She pauses again, draws three long, measured breaths, wills her heart to stop its fluttering against her sternum. “My parents.” Another pause, another breath, another sense of the truth sliding home. “My parents were imprisoned when I was three months old, for helping others defect from Russia. They were declared enemies of the state, put to work in the mines, and I was taken. They made me into a weapon for the country my parents were helping people leave. I was a part of their punishment.”

“Natasha--” Clint begins, but she’s been too still for too long, suddenly can’t tolerate it for another moment.

“I have to go.”

“Go where?” He sounds vaguely alarmed now, the sort of well-masked desperation she still catches in his voice when he thinks she might be slipping, might be losing track of the person she’s built out of gunpowder and ash and memory. “Stay put, I can--”

“I’m fine,” she interrupts, though it isn’t entirely true. It _is_ true in the sense that matters to him, though. In the sense that she thinks she will come back to him, eventually. “But I have to go.”

“Why?”

She straightens the papers carefully, folds them back into the file and closes it. “There’s a last known location here. It’s from 2010.”

* * *

It takes her another three days before she gets her final piece of intel. She follows the coordinates in the file at first, follows them to the outskirts of Norilsk, to a house that hasn’t been occupied in months, at least, and years, more likely. After that, she follows word of mouth, the charity of neighbors, the stories kept by a community something like home. 

She follows all of the leads to an empty church, its walls battered by the elements, by lack of care, to the graveyard out back, which is abandoned too. It’s scarcely the middle of June, but there’s still a chill in the air, and Natasha wraps her arms around herself as she weaves between the headstones, looking for names. The stones are worn by cold, by moss, weeds and grass practically obscuring some of them entirely. The fences that once protected them, once gave it a semblance of order, are all broken and leaning, signs of age creeping into this place that ought to be eternal.

She finds them by one of the dilapidated fences, two matching headstones, separated by a gulf of weeds. _Ilya Yozhin,_ she reads, and a few scant inches away _Nadezhda Yozhin._ The names from Hydra’s database, from the discrepancy that started this all. They died in the same year, she sees, though several months apart. Natasha takes a moment to wonder what the story was there, to imagine herself without each of the people she considers to be truly essential. 

Her hands move almost of their own accord, curling around the stalks of the weeds, ripping them from the earth, carefully at first, and then faster, more recklessly, until her breath is coming in gasps and her palms are going raw. She searches her mind as she works, scans the depths of memory, wills something to come back, anything--a snatch of her mother’s voice, or her father’s face, or even the way it felt to be held by them, in a time when she was too young to comprehend anything of value. When the weeds are gone, though, all she feels is the empty, sharp ache of loss. 

“Who were you?” she whispers finally, the voice of the child she’s never been, her fingers pressed to the cool surface of the headstones. “Who was I going to be?”

If a message from the universe is coming, she thinks, it will be now. She doesn’t know what she’s imagined--or she doesn’t know which imagined thing she’s expecting, more precisely. A rainbow in the dull sky, a butterfly from out of the tundra, a voice from beyond the grave. Nothing comes, though.

Nothing but silence all around, and Natasha can’t remember ever feeling quite so small.

* * *

After Norilsk, she loses track of Clint again. She sends him a message to confirm that she’s back in the States, that her mind is still--more or less--intact. She feels a cold little lick of anger crawl up behind her sternum when there’s no reply, but she shoves it down like everything else. Probably she ought to be worried, ought to be trying to find him, but if she’s honest with herself, she doesn’t want to. She’s had quite enough of the whole emotional attachment and vulnerability thing lately, is all too happy to come home to the message from Tony Stark suggesting that it’s time to get the team back together, time to get back to kicking Hydra asses. 

She spends half of her first week back in New York scouring the decrypted data for new leads, the other half moving a scant few things into Tony’s newly upgraded Tower. She isn’t really planning on making a home here--Isn’t sure she wants to make a home _anywhere_ at the moment, if she’s honest with herself. Still, she knows better than to leave it completely bare, and is unpacking some books onto one of the too-large, too-elaborate shelving units when the knock on the door interrupts her.

“Visitor, Ms. Romanoff,” comes JARVIS’s voice, which makes her jump when the knock itself didn’t. She is still unaccustomed to being accompanied at all times by a mostly-silent AI. 

“Yes,” says Natasha. “Thank you. Please give me some privacy, JARVIS.” She doesn’t entirely believe that her request will be met, doesn’t entirely care, either, but she says it anyway. 

She’s expecting to find Tony in the hallway, with a question about the intel she’s extracted from Hydra’s files, or maybe Steve, back from his missing persons quest. What she gets instead is Clint, here in the flesh for the first time in months, and looking so contrite that she can’t bring herself to slam the door in his face.

“Hi,” he says softly, offering her an apologetic little smile. “I should have called.”

“You should have,” she agrees, crossing her arms and resisting the urge to reach out and touch him.

“I’m--” He pauses, swallows, the muscles in his neck working visibly. “Can I come in?”

Natasha takes a step back to let him enter, watches as he closes the door behind him and waits until they are truly alone to drop the bomb she’s been contemplating. “They’re dead. Thanks for asking, by the way.”

Clint blinks, looks oddly dazed, uncharacteristically slow on the uptake. “I’m sorry.”

“Where the hell have you been?” she demands, determined not to accept another vague answer. 

He sighs, shoves his hands into his pockets and clears his throat. “On the road. I thought--Things fall apart, you start looking for your roots, right? That’s what you did. I did too. Been meaning to since New York, really. S.H.I.E.L.D. falling was just--convenient, I guess. Seemed like a sign.”

“You already knew your parents were dead,” says Natasha, fully aware that it sounds heartless, every bit as cold as people have always accused her of being. “You know exactly who they were. Where they’re buried.”

“I went looking for Barney,” says Clint, the edge of his voice sharp, cutting right through her facade of cruelty. “Turns out the Hydra leak gave me a lead on him, too. Because they were keeping tabs on him as potential collateral.”

She pauses, surprised. “Did you find him?”

“Yes.” He crosses his arms, the terseness of his response telling her that this isn’t a good news conversation on either end.

She takes a breath, purses her lips, aware now that she’s treading on delicate territory, on cracked ground. “Tell me.”

“I found him,” Clint repeats. “Not that it mattered, because he had no idea who I was. Or what he’d done ten minutes before, or ten minutes later. Memory like a sheet of Teflon. Alcohol does that, if you live long enough with it.”

Natasha wants to stay angry, wants the convenience, the safety of resentment. It’s what she’s been using on a lesser level to guard against the fear, the gnawing anxiety that _something_ is wrong with him, that she’s saved him from Loki only to lose him to the ghosts in his own mind, to the insidious apathy that’s been stealing away the most important person in her world. But there’s no sign of the indifference now, no sign of the distance, and she finds that she has no more excuses, no desire to be the cold. 

Instead she steps forward, closes the chasm between them and wraps her arms around his waist. For a moment he stands there, perfectly still, muscles taut, heart beating hard enough for her to hear as she rests her head against his chest. And then he relaxes, pulls her close and rests his chin against the top of her head. 

“I missed you,” he breathes, after a long moment.

“Who am I?” she asks, the question taking her by surprise, like it’s somehow managed to cross all the miles with her, stowed away at the back of her throat. “If I’m not the monster who murdered my parents, but I’m also not the person they would have raised me to be--Who am I?”

“You’re their daughter,” Clint says simply, pulling back a little to look at her, one arm still wrapped firmly around her shoulders. “You didn’t get to know them, but they’re still a part of you--Their genes, their choices, their ideals. Part them. Part all the other people you met along the way. You’re a person. You’re you.”

She swallows hard, her throat feeling treacherously tight. “And why doesn’t that feel like enough?”

Clint smiles ruefully. “Do you think it ever does? For anyone?”

Natasha shrugs helplessly. “I would like to believe that there exists a person out there somewhere who is comfortable with their identity.”

“There probably is,” says Clint. “And he’s probably a giant asshole.”

At that she laughs, in spite of everything. “Fair enough.”

“You’re an Avenger,” says Clint, as if that might somehow counter all of her doubts, might comfort her all on its own.

If she’s honest with herself it does, a little.

“So are you,” she counters, meeting and holding his gaze like she’s wanted to do so often when there was only the telephone in his place. 

He laughs, the muscles in his throat working visibly, then nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I am. I guess it’s time for us to get back to work.”


End file.
